Now we should not ask whether the soul and the body are one, unless the candle and the figure depicted on it are one.
Aristotle
According to the Aristotelian definition, soul is the first endeavor of a natural, organic body that has the potential of life and the beginning of movement and attitude. Effect is the form of the being in the state of possibility. The soul, therefore, is a different substance of the form, what "a particular body was to be". The soul, as a form of the living body, is "the cause and the beginning of the living body, the source and purpose of its movement." 1
The new unity of works by Vassilis Soulis, which was worked agonizingly and persistently over the last three years, begins with the lust of this imprint: the attempt to formulate the form of the soul through a painful and exciting process.
Starting with the undefined vision of a portrait where only the absolutely necessary would be depicted, along with a decisive conceptual and painting sign, as expressed in Gabriel Garcia Marshes' novel and factual certainty that "all people have three lives - public, private and secret", Soulis creates a fragile inspirational image gallery, consisting of 15 transparent oil paintings of common dimensions and related exogenous and endogenous components.
It is a personal log of recording the familiar and the unknown hinterland of his intimate people, organized and formulated through a simultaneous process of maturing and self-knowledge of the artist. The faces, painted by memory, invoking the endogenous ingredients of their raw material, touching rare monochromatic qualities and avoiding all sorts of descriptive or other baccarat, are created by whispering little: from light and from shadow, from hunger and hope, from visions of death and by traces of indelible life.
The private and public "lives of others" and the blurred areas of the mind, the syllables of thoughts, deeds and pauses, weaknesses and potentials, temptations and virtues, hidden secrets and lies, and especially surviving remnants of truth, the confessed image "and, above all, the unmistakable" is "of its form and its inner world, are traversed by the painter's precious painting. . An entire forest of shadows, breaths and hints talks with the locally stubborn and robust form of the form, with the recognizable features and the deliberately enlarged scale where it is imposed, with the eclectic tensions of the tonicity that stir and strike the surface of the works from the deep of the wits, boldly excavating the trench of the psyche of portraits.
These triple self-balancing equilibria at the tip of an invisible cohesive yarn, sometimes intermingling with the allegory of Wisdom and Time in the three symbolic portraits of Tishanus, sometimes with the lonely loneliness of Rustin's heroes, and sometimes with Botsoglu's beloved dwellers in the unforgettable Necks, are intimate references to specific people and family generations that haunt the visual and emotional field of the artist.
The ritualistic endless process of the revealing painting of Vasilis Soulis, with the use of fluid, bent, disappearance and rewriting, shattered by small, but decisive decisions, sometimes a localized condensation, and sometimes a deliberate non-finito, a flash of fierce discovery the inland of the Self and the country of the familiar Other, is a spirited visual narrative and at the same time, a confessional act of human Love.
Iris Kritikou March 2017 Aristotle,
Aristotle, "On the Soul", Ziros 2003, John S. Christodoulou
